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November 09, 2011

More than 75 percent of all 'honey' sold in grocery stores contains no honey at all

Be(e) sure to check out the list of fake honey, which includes Busy Bee Organic Honey, Kroger Pure Clover Honey, and Sue Bee Clover Honey among a long list of others. See the update at the end of this article regarding the NPR cover-up.

I sell organic, unfiltered honey at my coffeehouse (and we use it at the shop, too) in sterile, recycled rum and vodka bottles, many with the alcohol labels still attached. There is no label because it isn't a brand, it's just Steve's honey. It is procured by my friend Steve, who also sells organic baby greens, a staple in my life. I love that man! Anyhow, Steve mentioned that he was getting nowhere in is attempt to get his honey certified organic. It comes form an area with no commercial farming for at least 100 square miles, most likely more. He said that all honey labeled organic in the US is contaminated with GMO crops and pollutants from air and water. It's the dirty little secret of the organic honey industry in the US. That should be a boon to Steve's Nicaraguan honey, fetchng a nice price on the open market, but the organic certification agencies will not touch honey right now because of the blowback to the producers. The agencies refuse to test is honey. That's pretty telling.

I sell Steve's honey for half of what it costs in the US for FAKE honey!

From Natural News (a very interesting and informative website that I check out almost daily):

(NaturalNews) Just because those cute little bear-shaped bottles at the grocery store say "honey" on them does not necessarily mean that they actually contain honey. A comprehensive investigation conducted byFood Safety News(FSN) has found that the vast majority of so-called honey products sold at grocery stores, big box stores, drug stores, and restaurants do not contain any pollen, which means they are not real honey.

For the investigation, Vaughn Bryant, one of the nation's leading melissopalynologists, or experts in identifying pollen in honey, and director of the Palynology Research Laboratory at Texas A&M University, evaluated more than 60 products labeled as "honey" that had been purchased by FSN from ten states and the District of Columbia.

Bryant found that 76 percent of "honey" samples purchased from major grocery store chains like Kroger and Safeway, and 77 percent of samples purchased from big box chains like Sam's Club and Wal-Mart, did not contain any pollen. Even worse were "honey" samples taken from drug stores like Walgreens and CVS, and fast food restaurants like McDonald's and KFC, 100 percent of which were found to contain not a trace of pollen.

So what is all this phony honey made of? It is difficult to say for sure, as pollen is the key to verifying that honey is real. According to FSN, much of this imposter honey is more likely being secretly imported from China, and may even be contaminated with antibiotic drugs and other foreign materials.

Most conventional honey products have been illegally ultra-filtered to hide their true nature

According to FSN, the lack of pollen in most conventional "honey" products is due to these products having been ultra-filtered. This means that they have been intensely heated, forced through extremely tiny filters, and potentially even watered down or adulterated in some way prior to hitting store shelves.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) holds the position that any so-called honey products that have been ultra-filtered are not actually honey. But the agency refuses to do anything to stop this influx of illegitimate "honey" from flooding the North American market. It also continues to stonewall all petitions to establish a national regulatory standard for verifying the integrity of honey.

Ultra-filtering eliminates and destroys all medicinal properties of honey

Assuming that there is any real honey at all in the phony honey products tested by FSN, the removal of pollen and other delicate materials via ultra-filtering renders them medicinally dead. Raw honey is a health-promoting food that can help alleviate stomach problems, anemia, allergies, and other health conditions. Ultra-filtered honey is nothing more than a health-destroying processed sugar in the same vein as white table sugar or high fructose corn syrup.

The good news is that all of the honey products FSN tested from farmers markets, food cooperatives, and "natural" stores like Trader Joe's and Whole Foods, were found to contain pollen and a full array of antioxidants and other nutrients. Local beekeepers are another great source of obtaining raw, unprocessed, real honey.

How else to explain the reaction to a recent report about honey on the web site Food Safety News? Food Safety News is published by a lawyer who represents plaintiffs in lawsuits against food manufacturers and processors.

The post, by journalist Andrew Schneider, claimed that most honey on supermarket shelves isn't really honey. As evidence, the site cited tests showing that there is no pollen in most of that honey. (Raw honey contains lots of pollen, which bees collect along with the nectar that they turn into honey.)

If there's no pollen, asserted the story, then the honey must have been "ultrapurified," a technique that can involve diluting honey with extra water, running it through extremely fine filters, and then removing the water.

The article implied that this was part of a deliberate attempt to prevent anyone from detecting illicit honey from China. (The United States blocks imports of Chinese honey because U.S. officials decided that it was being sold at artificially low prices, undercutting American honey producers.) Schneider also reminded his readers that Chinese honey has had a history of safety problems, including contamination with banned antibiotics and lead.

Got that? Food that doesn't deserve its name, processed beyond recognition, probably adulterated, maybe unsafe, of unknown origin. It sounded so right, plenty of people decided that it just had to be true.

Bloggers and online publications ran with the story. "Most honey isn't really honey," posted Grist, repeating much of Schneider's story. "Honey! It isn't real!" shouted TriplePundit. CNN's food blog, Eatocracy, was slightly more measured: "Most honey sold in U.S. grocery stores not worthy of its name." Tom Philpott, food blogger for Mother Jones, picked up the story as well.

Here at NPR, we found the post interesting, too. But then we decided to look into it a little more closely. We talked to honey companies, academic experts, and one of the world's top honey laboratories in Germany. The closer we looked, the more misleading the story in Food Safety News seemed.

First of all, we learned that missing pollen actually is not evidence of "ultrapurification." We visited one of the country's top-tier honey packers, Dutch Gold, in Lancaster, Pa. We saw raw honey getting pumped through layers of white filters. Before the honey hit the filters, a powdered sedimentary rock called diatomaceous earth was added.

This is a standard, widely used process. It removes all the pollen, along with dust, bees' wings, and, of course, the diatomaceous earth. But it is not ultrafiltration, which filters out much more and produces a sweet substance that is no longer, in fact, honey.

"Consumers don't tend to like crystallized honey," says Jill Clark, vice president for sales and marketing at Dutch Gold. "It's very funny. In Canada, there's a lot of creamed honey sold, and people are very accustomed to honey crystallizing. Same in Europe. But the U.S. consumer is very used to a liquid product, and as soon as they see those first granules of crystallization, we get the phone calls: 'Something's wrong with my honey!'"

There's an exception to this filtration process. Dutch Gold also packs organic honey from Brazil, and organic honey doesn't go through nearly as fine a filter. Clark says that this is because organic rules prohibit the use of diatomaceous earth in the filtering process.

Of course, the raw honey that Dutch Gold gets in 50-gallon drums does contain pollen. As part of a recent auditing process, the company sent samples of imported honey that it received from India and Vietnam to a laboratory in Germany. There, scientists analyzed the pollen in that raw honey, and came to the conclusion that it was, in fact, from flowers that grow in the countries that claimed to be producing that honey.

Bottom line: Supermarket honey doesn't have pollen, but you can still call it honey. Call it filtered honey. And the lack of pollen says nothing about where it may have come from.

Now, could there still be fraud going on, involving ultrafiltration and Chinese honey? Yes, but not in the way described by the Food Safety News article.

Some people suspect that Chinese exporters are ultrafiltering some of their honey and sending it to, say, India. There, it could be mixed into raw Indian honey and exported to the US. Pollen analysis would show that this honey was from India, although at least one expert, Vaughn Bryant at Texas A&M University, says that he's seeing imported honey with an unnaturally low concentration of pollen. This, he says, could be evidence of ultrafiltration. Or it could be the kind of filtration done in the U.S., which also removes pollen.

One more thing: It's worth remembering that Chinese honey is barred from the U.S. not because it's unsafe, but because U.S. officials decided it was too cheap. Chinese honey has had more than its share of safety problems. But there's also plenty of perfectly good Chinese honey for sale on the world market. The European Union is much more fussy about honey quality than the U.S., yet the EU imports lots of honey from China.

Thanks for sharing this. i don't find NPR to be a credible news source. (9-11 was done by Al Qaeda, no mention of the Israeli spy ring, covered up teh Franklin child prostitution ring, and they promoted the global warming hoax.) It's all controlled news with a little spin to make it look like they are credible to leftist/progressives. Yes, there are lots of legitimate honey producers in the world. But the FSN would never have printed something that would line the up for huge lawsuits by the honey manufacturers if they were not absolutely sure of their allegations. I also know from Steve that he cannot get his honey certified organic because there is no more testing at the level because if GMO and pesticide contamination.

The Chinese have even created fake rice with plastic pellets. How is it that a geographically small country with the largest population on the planet has become an exporter of food products like honey? We know what the country looks like. We saw huge tracks of waste land. So how are they feeding their population? With fake food. Just because the US govt says honey from China is banned because it is priced too low doesn't mean that the Chinese are actually selling real honey. (And we know that it isn't real or they could get a much higher price in the world market.)

There are almost no USDA standards for honey and no consequences if the honey producers make false claims. Grade C honey can contain up to 20 percent water! Meanwhile, the USDA and FDA have undertaken numerous SWAT style-raids on sellers of raw milk.

Honey standards and certification are an important way for consumers to know what they are getting. With standards it is easier to trust the quality and source by simply checking the label of the honey we buy. Without standards, if it is labeled, “Pure Honey”, what does that mean? Does it also contain corn syrup as well as ‘pure’ honey? Unfortunately this is a possibility.

Standards begin with a common definition and description. An excellent definition of honey comes from the World Health Organization (WHO) Codex Alimentarius (CA) for Honey, “Honey is the natural sweet substance, produced by honey bees from the nectar of plants or from secretions of living parts of plants or excretions of plant-sucking insects on the living parts of plants, which the bees collect, transform by combining with specific substances of there own, deposit, dehydrate, store and leave in honeycombs to ripen and mature.”

For the description of honey, it continues, “Honey consists essentially of different sugars predominantly glucose and fructose. The color of honey varies from nearly colorless to dark brown. The consistency can be fluid, viscous or partly to entirely crystallized. The flavor and aroma vary, but usually derive from the plant origin.”

In the definition, you may have read, “…excretions of plant-sucking insects…”!? That doesn’t sound too appetizing. How does that relate to the honey we know? You may be surprised to learn, much of the worlds’ honey is made partly or entirely from sweet excretions of insects rather than nectar from blossoms. It is called honeydew, fir or forest honey. It is much loved by those who prefer a darker and stronger tasting honey. There are two official types of honey based on their source:

- Blossom Honey or Nectar Honey; the honey which bees create from nectars of plants.- Honeydew Honey; the honey which bees create mainly from sap secreted by insects (Hemiptera) from the living parts of plants or secretions of living parts of plants.

Enforcement of these standards varies by country. In United States there is no inspection or enforcement. Honey may carry the USDA seal, but there are few federal standards for honey, no government certification and no consequences for making false claims. This is directly from the USDA Rules and Regulations, “…honey does not require official inspection in order to carry official USDA grade marks…there are no existing programs that require the official inspection and certification of honey…”

The best method for determining the quality of honey produced in the USA is to know the local producer and ask them about their honey and production procedures.

The FSN report found that Trader Joe's , Whole Foods and Farmers Markets had pure honey. 76 percent of the supermarkets had such remarkable differences that they should not be labeled honey. KFC uses packets labeled honey, but there list of ingredients is corn syrup, artificial colors and flavors. They get away with this because there is no law prohibiting honey producers from mislabeling their product.

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I AM SOOOOO CONFUSED! I BOUGHT 2 DIFFERENT KINDS OF HONEY TONIGHT...BOTH AT KROGER AND THEIR KROGER NAME ON THEM. ONE IS PURE CLOVER HONEY (KROGER) ONE IS (KROGER VALUE PURE HONEY)! PLZZZZZZZZZZZ HELP ME!

One problem with this article is the supposition that honey from other sources like farmers markets and local beekeepers is alright. Who can support that hypothesis with fact? Who is testing honey from local sources? No one is. Thinking that the marketplace will take care of all problems just allows the most greedy to become very successful.